I don't want to give anyone the impression that I was an overly-sickly child when I was a lad, but I'm struck by how many comics I associate with times I was off school and ill in bed. To be honest, usually my ailment consisted of nothing more than being sick of school and fancying a bit of a break, but, occasionally, I was actuallysuffering from some life-threatening illness like a mild cold or a dose of diarrhoea. Sometimes I could even milk a slightly higher temperature and a headache for all they were worth.
It was the morning of my eleventh birthday, and my fate had just been decided. Because I was feeling 'off-colour', I didn't have to go to school that day ("Hooray!"), so I sat up in bed and allowed myself to be nourished by frequent administrations of American cream soda and a lunchtime bowl of tomato soup. I was surrounded by a plethora of comics, three of which I particularly remember, being the following: THE MIGHTY THOR #158, MARVEL COLLECTORS' ITEM CLASSICS #6, and that week's issue of WHIZZER & CHIPS.
Funnily enough, although I primarily recall these comics from that particular day, I had acquired the two Marvel publications perhaps a week or two before and can still remember buying them. However, I tend to associate them mainly
with my birthday because, in my eagerness to distract myself from my bedridden tedium, I completely immersed myself in their four-colour pages. This no doubt accounts for why the
issues and the day made more of an impression on me than would normally be the case. Anyway, someday we'll get around to looking at MCIC #6 in more detail, but for the moment let's focus on Thor #158.
"THE WAY IT WAS!" proclaims the splash page, and that's precisely what it delivers - a look back at how Thor The Mighty (as he was originally referred to) came to be. Ol' Goldilocks' origin from JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #83 is re-presented, with some small alterations to its splash to accommodate a flashback scenario. If you compare DON BLAKE's arm in the far-right bottom picture with its original printing, you'll see that it has been extended outwards to accentuate the appearance of his limp.
Interestingly, when Marvel first released their MASTERWORKS editions, they recreated the splash page of Thor's debut from proofs of this reprint (as well as utilising the rest of the pages) because they had apparently mislaid proofs of the original printing. Although a better-quality source has since turned up (which can be seen in the OMNIBUS and one or two other volumes), the inferior version still surfaces from time to time.I remember my father reading this comic after me, and expressing his disappointment that it was a continued story. I don't think he ever found out what had happened to the 'real' Thor - mainly because I never bothered to tell him when I read the concluding part of the tale reprinted in SPIDER-MAN COMICS WEEKLY around 1975. I doubt he would have remembered ever having seen the cliff-hanger ending to the first instalment by then anyway.
So there you have it! I'll reveal the answer as unfolded in Thor # 159 another time. I had to wait about sixteen or seventeen years before I acquired the original American issue, so a few weeks or months of suspense isn't going to kill you.
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